Abstract
M.Ed.
This research was undertaken during the inception of the outcomes Or
competency-based approach to the teacher education programme, which few
teachers have had experience of. The shift from a product, input curriculum to a
process, output approach, requires new approaches that require teachers to
critically reflect on their approaches to teaching with the aim of guiding learners
to derive meaning from what is taught through critical reflection.
Against the preceding background, the question that was addressed in this study
can be stated as follows:
To what extent are teacher educators at a college of education teaching for
critical reflective thinking in the training of students?
This research was an attempt to investigate the extent to which teacher
educators at a college of education are fostering critical reflection in the teaching
of students. It has also attempted to highlight methods and techniques - that
constitute good practice because teachers should serve as role models in their
teaching and take initiative in motivating students to realise that teaching is an
elegant web of alternative activities in which they engage with the content,
sometimes with the teacher, sometimes with each other, and sometimes alone.
The empirical investigation has been conducted from a constructivist
(interpretive) approach in the sense that the key concern of understanding the
phenomenon of interest was viewed from the participants' perspectives.
Qualitative methods of data collection, namely of observation and interviews, were used. Data for observation was recorded via field notes, and data analysis
Was done using the constant comparative method.
The main findings of the study can be summarised as follows:
The overall finding of this research was that most teachers still consider drill
work as a means of achieving the goal of seeing the students through an
examination and still use the traditional methods of teaching. Students were still
encouraged to regurgitate and mimic what had been taught to them, without
critically reflecting on the meaning of words and concepts for the purpose of
understanding. The telling method is still employed by the majority of teachers at
this college of education. In this empirical investigation, I further discovered that
only a handful of teachers demonstrate techniques that encourage critical and
reflective thinking in students although traces of teaching for examinations were
still noticeable. During my investigation, I further discovered that although the
majority of teachers know that they should teach students for critical reflection,
they were reluctant to employ methods and techniques that promote critical
reflection because they found them firstly, to be time consuming, and secondly,
they alleged that ,students do not always participate during lessons. Teaching for
critical reflective thinking is not emphasised at this college of education.